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Paradox of choice

Have you ever had the need to order food on Zomato, but ended up scrolling the app for ages and thinking for so long about what you want, that you finally just decide to dine out or cook? This project tries to understand the reasoning behind this behavior and possible solutions to overcome it.

Key words

Behaviour study, UX design, UI design

Project duration

3 weeks ( April 2021)

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The paradox of choice

The Mayo News

The paradox of choice is an observation that having many options to choose from, rather than making people happy and ensuring that they get what they want, can cause stress and problematize decision-making.

Before ordering

  • Even when the user goes with the mindset of ordering a particular dish in mind, they get distracted while seeing the other restaurants in the app.

  • In certain cases the user doesn't know what they want to order so they have hard time making the final decision.

  • It would save time to filter out unwanted restaurants which don't have the dish they are searching for as bestseller.

While ordering

  • Some users tend to order from restaurants they previously ordered from when they have a hard time making up their mind.

  • Though Zomato has filters to help filter out unrelated options 50% of the users in the research said they have never used it.

  • Users prefer to see restaurants similar to the ones they order from as that would help them make faster decisions.

  • Users take a time period within 15 minutes to decide what to order if they know what and which restaurant to order from when they order.

  • When they don't know what they want They take from 15 mins to 1 hour to decide.

Primary Research

Primary research was done in the form of personal interviews with the help of a questionnaire

Why do too many choices affect decision making ? 

01

Decision fatigue

02

Fear of missing out (FOMO)

03

Paradox of choice

04

Choice overload

jar-01.png

This display attracted 40% of the shoppers and 30% of the shoppers made a purchase.

jar-02.png

The display with 24 flavours of jam attracted 60% of shoppers and 3% of the shoppers made a purchase.

The Jam Experiment

The jam experiment was conducted by psychologists Sheena Iyengar from Columbia University and Mark Lepper from Standford University in 2000.This experiment clearly showcases how the number of choices affects the sales of a product and showcases how the concept of choice overload works. A display of jams was placed in a local food market. On one table 6 flavours of jam were displayed, and in the other one 24 flavours of jams were displayed. From this study we can see clearly that the number of choices not only affects the user but also affects the sales volume the products. ​

User Flow Redesign

Current user flow

Proposed user flow

Final Redesign

Landing page

The quiz is for those users who don't have any particular restaurant in mind. At the end of the quiz, a list of restaurants according to the user's preference will be generated.

The Quiz

Explore

The explore page leads the user to the current zomato landing page. At the end of the landing page after showing a list of 15 restaurants, the more restaurants button will appear. If users wish to view more restaurants they can press this button. This button would make the user think twice before viewing more restaurants and henceforth help reduce the number of choices to a limited amount. 

My restaurants

Zomato is not just an app for food delivery, but it started as an app that curated a list of restaurants for dining out options. I want to make more emphasis on that in the form of 'My restaurants'. This option also helps the choice overload problem by letting the user have a list of their favorite restaurants they trust when they don't know where to order from.

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